walmart
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Matt Baer’s future of shopping has a familiar face
He grew up in a furniture family, took a detour through law, and helped build the digital businesses at Walmart and Macy’s. At Stitch Fix, Matt Baer is betting that the future of shopping will feel a little more like being remembered.
Michael Bender and the art of getting back to the customer
Before he became Kohl’s CEO, Michael Bender had run stores, helped build an online business and advised the people in charge. Now he has to make all that experience count for the shopper walking through the door.
John Furner and the price of a minute
He started in a Bentonville garden center. Three decades later, Walmart’s CEO is betting that the future of shopping depends on understanding what people would rather be doing.
Jack Sinclair and the art of leaving things out
After running grocery at Walmart, Jack Sinclair made a different bet at Sprouts: smaller stores, a more selective audience and products worth a second shopping trip. As he prepares to become executive chairman, that bet faces a fresh test.
Dave Caspers and the work between the big announcements
From Target to Leslie’s to the top job at Ardent Health, Dave Caspers has built a career around operations. His public words keep returning to the people who make the plans work.
Jenn Ericksen and the stairwell that led somewhere
A briefing about Jet.com became a turning point for Jenn Drago Ericksen. Her path to eBay’s CEO communications team has since passed through basketball, a proposed city and kitchen counters.
Greg Foran and the education of a shopkeeper
He started by filling supermarket shelves in Hamilton. After Walmart and Air New Zealand, Greg Foran is back in the grocery aisle at Kroger, where familiar principles face a new test.
Andy Ruben and the trouble with a perfectly good jacket
He helped Walmart think about waste, then nearly lost his own company trying to keep useful things in circulation. Andy Ruben’s route from Yerdle to Trove reveals how much has to change before a jacket can be sold twice.
Tony Rogers
Tony Rogers is the Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer of Dollar General, where he leads brand, media, personalization and the DG Media Network across the retailer's roughly 20,000 stores. A University of Texas graduate who started in accounting before turning to marketing, he built a 25-year career at consumer brands and retailers including Pillsbury, Frito-Lay and Gateway before spending more than 17 years at Walmart, where he rose to Chief Marketing Officer of Walmart U.S. and later Chief Member Officer at Sam's Club. He joined Dollar General in June 2024 after a stint as CMO of Signet Jewelers, bringing a philosophy built around purpose, evolution and keeping the customer at the center of every decision.
William White
William White is the Chief Marketing Officer of Walmart, a role he has held since May 2020. He leads customer insights, brand strategy, and full-funnel marketing for the world's largest retailer, and is credited with steering Walmart's marketing through the pandemic, launching Walmart+, and building the retailer into a more culturally and emotionally connected brand. Before Walmart he spent seven years at Target and nearly nine years at Coca-Cola, where he scaled Coke Zero into a billion-dollar brand. He ranked #4 on Forbes' 2024 list of the World's Most Influential CMOs.
Alasdair McLean-Foreman
Alasdair McLean-Foreman is the founder and CEO of Teikametrics, a Boston-based AI platform that helps Amazon and Walmart sellers optimize advertising and pricing across more than $10 billion in marketplace transactions. A former Great Britain 800m runner and Harvard track captain, he started selling sporting goods from his dorm room in 2001, became one of Amazon's first third-party retailers in 2003, exited a fitness startup to News Corp, and has raised roughly $65 million for Teikametrics from investors including Intel Capital, Jump Capital, Centana Growth Partners and SoftBank's Lydia Jett.
Ciaran Long
Ciaran Long is the CEO of a.k.a. Brands Holding Corp. (NYSE: AKA), a portfolio of next-generation fashion brands targeting Gen Z and millennial consumers. A qualified Irish Chartered Accountant with 25-plus years of financial and strategic leadership, Long joined a.k.a. Brands as CFO in 2021, stepped into an interim CEO role in 2023, and was named permanent CEO in January 2025. Under his leadership the company returned to net sales growth with three consecutive quarters of double-digit U.S. sales expansion, repositioning the portfolio around a demand-driven 'test-and-learn' merchandising model and a major bet on physical retail expansion. He previously served as CFO of Samsclub.com and held senior roles across Walmart's e-commerce division, and earlier in his career he co-founded CleanGrow, a water quality sensor technology startup.
Deren Baker
Deren Baker is the CEO of Flywheel Ventures, the innovation arm of Flywheel Commerce Network - now part of Omnicom Group after a landmark $835 million acquisition in 2023. A serial operator with deep roots in digital commerce analytics, Baker has led transformative companies including Jumpshot (which tracked 160 billion monthly clicks) and Edge by Ascential. He is a recognized thought leader in ecommerce strategy, retail media, and data-driven advertising, with bylines in Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Entrepreneur Magazine.
Amit Sharma
Amit Sharma founded Narvar in 2013 to fix the most overlooked moment in e-commerce: the anxious gap between clicking 'buy' and the package arriving at the door. Drawing on years spent optimizing supply chains at Williams-Sonoma, Walmart, and Apple, he built a post-purchase experience platform from a bootstrapped garage operation into a market leader serving 650+ retailers - including Sephora, Home Depot, LVMH, and Patagonia - before stepping back from the CEO role in October 2024 to an advisory position.
Jeremy Verba
Jeremy Verba is the CEO of CoinCover, a Cardiff-based digital asset disaster recovery and wallet protection company that has safeguarded 600+ businesses and 22+ million wallets since 2018. A Silicon Valley veteran with 30+ years scaling fast-growth businesses from $10M to $250M, Verba previously led VUDU at Walmart, served as CEO of eHarmony across 18 countries, founded Zynga's Treasure Isle studio (the fastest-growing Facebook game at launch), and built Piczo into one of the world's largest teen social platforms. He holds a B.S. in Architecture from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School, and joined CoinCover in February 2026 to drive its transition from category creation to institutional-scale growth.
Shekhar Natarajan
Shekhar Natarajan is the Founder and CEO of Orchestro.AI and the inventor of Angelic Intelligence, a framework that embeds ethics directly into AI architecture rather than bolting it on as an afterthought. He grew up in a one-room home in Secunderabad, Hyderabad, arrived in the US with $34, and spent 25+ years scaling supply chains at Walmart, Disney, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Target, and American Eagle before founding Orchestro.AI in 2023. He holds 207+ patents, raised $15M in seed funding, and in May 2026 received Oxford's Bodleian Medal for his contributions to AI in the public interest.
Louie Bacaj
Louie Bacaj is an Albanian-American software engineer turned entrepreneur who climbed from immigrant poverty in the Bronx to Senior Director of Engineering at Walmart, then walked away from it all in 2021 to build a portfolio of small bets. He co-founded the Small Bets learning community with Daniel Vassallo, runs the M&Ms Newsletter on Substack with 9,000+ subscribers, and teaches engineers how to level up their careers and build income outside the 9-to-5. His philosophy: make money with bits, diversify into atoms.